MANDELA WIRED TO THE MOON IN TRANSLATION

Standing alongside world dignitaries, including Barack Obama, was a rounded black man in formal attire, an interpreter for the deaf and mute, translating the service into sign language. Those versed in sign language gradually became aware that something strange was going on: the man was a fake; he was making up his own signs; he was flapping his hands around, but there was no meaning in it.

Nelson Mandela, country lad, lawyer, freedom fighter, amateur boxer, womaniser, political prisoner, President, rugby supporter and peace celeb becomes a saint and goes to the Moon on a Chinese space-ship.

This version of events is no more meaningless than the reports on television in which a part-filled football stadium hosts a wake, during which powerful people laugh and joke and take photos of themselves.

The need to sing the song 'Free Nelson Mandela' continues.

For he is not free. The song is not about one man. Not even about one saint. It is not even about one moon. It is about one world.

Only one man in a large army

You're so blind that you cannot see

You're so deaf that you cannot hear

What we see and what we hear depends on who's telling us the story. Who is interpreting.

Thamsanqa Jantjie, 34, was a qualified interpreter hired by the African National Congress from his firm South African Interpreters

Nelson Mandela is the man in the moon now, taken there by the Chinese lunar mission, itself an echo of previous Starship-Empire voyages by the USA and the USSR, out of which come such boons as teflon-coated frying pans.

A science correspondent on BBC Foyle says that the Chinese lunar landing on the moon is more about politics than it is about science.

Will we see another space race, as the one in the 1960s and 70s that steered human progress down hubristic blind alleys of Empire building, when research into cures for cancer and safe means for women to control their fertility would have been more beneficial?

Jantjie's performance was not meaningless – precisely because it delivered no particular meaning (the gestures were meaningless), it directly rendered meaning as such – the pretence of meaning.

Everything is open to interpretation, fake or fair, and we see and hear the stories most trumpeted at us. By media of all kinds.

All the crocodile tears of the dignitaries were a self-congratulatory exercise, and Jangtjie translated them into what they effectively were: nonsense. What the world leaders were celebrating was the successful postponement of the true crisis which will explode when poor, black South Africans effectively become a collective political agent. They were the Absent One to whom Jantjie was signalling, and his message was: the dignitaries really don't care about you. Through his fake translation, Jantjie rendered palpable the fake of the entire ceremony.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/16/fake-mandela-memorial-interpreter-schizophrenia-signing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgcTvoWjZJU1:23:00 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03lshf9/Breakfast_16_12_2013/

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